Pretending that things are nicely boxed up and put away robs us of great riches.
To heal, it seems we have to stand in the middle of the horror, at the foot of the cross, and wait out another’s suffering where that person can see us.
I don’t think you have time to waste not writing because you are afraid you won’t be good enough at it, and I don’t think you have time to waste on someone who does not respond to you with kindness and respect.
The search for meaning will fill you with a sense of meaning. Otherwise.
It’s not like you don’t have a choice, because you do – you can either type or kill yourself.
A friend of mine says that the first draft is the down draft – you just get it down. The second draft is the up draft – you fix it up. You try to say what you have to say more accurately. And the third draft is the dental draft, where you check every tooth, to see if it’s loose or cramped or decayed, or even, God help us, healthy.
However, in the meantime, we are going to concentrate on writing itself, on how to become a better writer, because, for one thing, becoming a better writer is going to help you become a better reader, and that is the real payoff.
Some aching beauty comes with huge loss, although maybe not right away, when it would be helpful. Life is a very powerful force, despite the constant discouragement. So if you are a person with connections to life, a few tendrils eventually break through the sidewalk of loss, and you notice them, maybe space out studying them for a few moments, or maybe they tickle you into movement and response, if only because you have to scratch your nose.
When we are stuck in our convictions and personas, we enter into the disease of having good ideas and being right.
Easter is so profound. Christmas was an afterthought in the early Church, the birth not observed for a couple hundred years. But no one could help noticing the resurrection: Rumi said that spring was Christ, “martyred plants rising up from their shrouds.” Easter says that love is more powerful than death, bigger than the dark, bigger than cancer, bigger even than airport security lines.
Jesus was a rabbi, schooled by rabbis, who thought like rabbis. Rabbis, upon being asked a question by a disciple, usually answer with a paradoxical inquiry or a story. This can be annoying and time-consuming for those of us looking for neat, simple answers. But truth is too wild and complex to be contained in one answer, so Jesus often responded with a question or a parable.
Thurber was right when he said, “You might as well fall flat on your face as lean over too far backwards.
They taught me to pay attention, but not so much attention to my tiny princess mind.
Kindness toward others and radical kindness to ourselves buy us a shot at a warm and generous heart, which is the greatest prize of all.
Mercy means compassion, empathy, a heart for someone’s troubles. It’s not something you do – it is something in you, accessed, revealed, or cultivated through use, like a muscle. We find it in the most unlikely places, never where we first look.
We’re bugs struggling in the river, brightly visible to the trout below.
If we stay where we are, where we’re stuck, where we’re comfortable and safe, we die there. We become like mushrooms, living in the dark, with poop up to our chins. If you want to know only what you already know, you’re dying. You’re saying: Leave me alone; I don’t mind this little rathole. It’s warm and dry. Really, it’s fine.
Writing involves seeing people suffer and, as Robert Stone once put it, finding some meaning therein.
Perfectionism is a mean, frozen form of idealism, while.
At the same time, the truth is that we are beloved, even in our current condition, by someone; we have loved and been loved. We have also known the abyss of love lost to death or rejection, and that it somehow leads to new life. We have been redeemed and saved by love, even as a few times we have been nearly destroyed, and worse, seen our children nearly destroyed. We are who we love, we are one, and we are autonomous.